Salon.com > Maxwell Strachan

WikiLeaks: The four most extreme calls for retribution

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:30:00 +0000

Calls for retribution against Julian Assange, the Australian activist whose WikiLeaks organization released 250,000 sensitive State Department cables over the weekend, are nothing new. In October, after a previous document dump, The National Review's Jonah Goldberg actually wondered aloud why the Assange was not yet, well... dead. This time around, Assange's critics still can't agree on the means or the end -- but they do hold one belief in common: WikiLeaks must be permanently silenced.

Here are four of the most extreme suggestions -- so far -- for how the U.S. government should handle Assange:

1. Even before the latest document leak, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., was on television claiming WikiLeaks presents "a clear and present danger to America" and touting the necessity of classifying it as an official terrorist operation under the Espionage Act. That declaration would allow the government to "seize their funds" and eventually shut the organization down. Fair to say, King wants that declaration.

The 12 most absurdly leading “Ed Show” poll questions

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:01:00 +0000

When Ed Schultz, the exuberant progressive cheerleader who hosts a nightly MSNBC show, exhorts his viewers to "Get your cell phones out," brace yourself -- chances are a comically slanted question is coming.

Since its debut more than a year ago, "The Ed Show" has featured a text message poll. After a lengthy, often impassioned monologue from the host, viewers are asked to text their replies, with the results announced at the end of the hour. It's a harmless gimmick and "Ed" is hardly the first show to use it. But Ed's poll has a unique twist: More often than not, 85 percent or more of the audience will come down on the same side -- Ed's side.

That's what happens when you ask questions like Friday night's: "Do you think it's a good thing that President Obama is fighting harder against the Republicans?" Not surprisingly, 95 percent of the show's liberal audience -- which has been subject to countless hours of Ed pleading with the president to adopt a more assertive posture -- thought it was a good thing. The "Ed" show polls have all the suspense of a sham third-world election. It's enough to make us wonder: Why does anyone even bother replying?

Tragic moments in political bribery

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:20:00 +0000

Upon learning last week that federal agents were at his door, Jack Johnson, the Prince Georges County (Md.) executive, allegedly gave his wife some odd instructions: "Put it in your bra and walk out or something." The "it" was $79,600 of cold, corrupt cash, which the FBI says it ultimately recovered from Mrs. Johnson's underwear. (It's also not counting a $100,000 check that authorities suspect Johnson's wife flushed down the toilet.)

Johnson, interestingly, is not the first politician to see undergarments as a means of hiding his crimes. His case is a reminder of some of the comical complications that can result when politicians take bribes.

Bill Jefferson's freezer: William Jefferson, a nine-term congressman from Louisiana, became a laughingstock when it was revealed he had stuffed $90,000 into his freezer in a feeble attempt to hide the money from authorities. Unfortunately, even below-freezing temperatures couldn't scare authorities away. The money was found, and Jefferson became, in the words of his defense attorney, "a national joke."

12 takeaways from the Bush memoir

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:01:00 +0000

George W. Bush’s memoir, "Decision Points," is due to be released Tuesday (with the obligatory national TV interview, conducted by Matt Lauer to air tonight), but most of the good stuff is already circulating on the Web. What have we learned so far?

Bush is still linking Saddam to WMD: Sure, he no longer tries to prove Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but as David Corn points out, that hasn’t stopped him from subtly implying that the "homicidal dictator" (correct) was still in the process of "pursuing WMD" (wrong).
He "did consider" replacing Cheney in 2003: Because the vice-president was a "lightning rod of criticism," Bush admits he contemplated taking Cheney up on his offer to leave the administration after the 2004 elections. It was, he wrote, a chance to demonstrate to Americans who was really "in charge."
Kanye West's post-Katrina comments hit hard: George Bush's presidency covered all corners of controversy, but what was the "all-time low"? Seven words uttered in a state of panic by a hip-hop star: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
Cheney's friendship factored into the Scooter Libby decision: After Libby was found guilty of lying under oath during the Valerie Plame trial, Cheney believed Bush owed it to the vice-president’s chief of staff to offer him a full pardon. Bush, of course, ultimately commuted Libby's sentence -- but now admits that he was worried this compromise might complicate his friendship with an "angry" Cheney.
His mother showed him the fetus of his would-be sibling: Barbara Bush suffered a miscarriage when her son was a teenager, and afterward opted to show the fetus, which she was storing in a jar, to her then teenage son. Bush considers the incident key to his pro-life stance, telling Lauer "there's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life."
He explicitly permitted waterboarding: Bush's presidency was marked by a prolonged legal and ethical debate over whether waterboarding is a legitimate interrogation technique or a form of torture. Bush himself wasn't so conflicted. When the CIA asked permission to use the tactic during the questioning of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged 9/11 attacker, his reply was painfully terse: "Damn right."
He thinks his Texas governorship prepared him for 9/11: In the moments after he first heard about 9/11, the president famously sat silent. But that was anger, not shock, he now says. So why did he sit motionless? He knew "people were going to be watching my reaction. And I’d had enough experience as governor of Texas ... to know that the reaction of the leader is essential in the first stage of any crisis."
A bioterror scare in 2001 prompted fears that Bush had been infected: On a trip to China shortly after 9/11, Cheney asked Bush to enter a tent, along with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The issue? The toxin botulism had been detected inside the White House. Cheney told Bush that he might be infected (although he wasn't.) And why the tent? "Because Chinese listeners cannot penetrate the tent."
He takes a shot at his old political foe, John McCain: Bush says McCain, who "suspended" his presidential campaign during the Wall Street meltdown, missed an opportunity to wield the financial collapse to his advantage during his presidential campaign. "In periods of crisis," Bush writes, "voters value experience and judgment over youth and charisma." But, Bush concludes, McCain didn’t handle "the challenge in a statesmanlike way."
Putin's got a big dog: As Maureen Dowd noted in her Sunday column, Vladimir Putin once bragged to Bush that his dog was "bigger, stronger, and faster" than Bush's beloved Barney. "[You're] lucky he only showed you [the] dog," Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, later told Bush.
He was a "dissenting voice" on Iraq: Despite the rushed resolutions in Congress and the U.N., Bush maintains he was reluctant to go to war and that he "didn’t want to use force" unless entirely necessary. That said ...
He also will not issue an apology for the Iraq war: "Apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision," he tells Lauer.

The Year in Sanity: Ron Artest

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 01:01:00 +0000

Ron Artest may seem like an odd choice for a series about sanity. After all, "sane" is just about the last word many would use to describe the Los Angeles Lakers forward whose career has been marred by controversy after self-imposed controversy. From brawling with fans to boozing at halftime to requesting time off to pursue a rap career, Artest has long established himself as one of basketball's more bizarre figures.

So, it was perfectly in line with his oddball persona when, moments after the Lakers secured their second consecutive championship in June, Artest thanked his psychiatrist for helping him to calm down. Few people saw significance in the remark apart from its obvious viral potential.

Fox host apologizes for anti-Muslim comment

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:14:00 +0000

On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade defended Bill O'Reilly's recent Whoopi-walkout-inducing comments on "The View" ("Muslims killed us on 9/11") by explaining that "not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim." The remark generated enough uproar that Kilmeade felt it necessary to make this terse apology today:

On the show on Friday, I was talking about Bill O’Reilly appearance on "The View" and I said this: “Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.” Well, I misspoke. I don’t believe all terrorists are Muslims. I’m sorry about that, if I offended or hurt anybody’s feelings. But that’s it.

Here's the video via Media Matters:

Cops: Staten Island teens tormented Muslim student

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:30:00 +0000

Authorities have charged four Staten Island teenagers with assault and aggravated harassment -- and are classifying both as hate crimes -- for allegedly terrorizing a Muslim classmate while he was in the eighth grade last year.

Kristian, a Muslim student who is now 16 years old and has been identified only by his first name, was the focus of a profile in the Staten Island Advance on Sunday. He told the paper the bullying started last year and at first he was called gay. Then his tormentors' focus shifted to the fact that he is Muslim (though his family is not particularly observant). The paper reports:

One day, Kristian recalled, he took a seat in the cafeteria to have lunch. A student snuck up behind him, grabbed his hair and yanked his head back, while a second one spat in his face.

"They called me a Muslim terrorist," Kristian said. "That I came to this country to blow down houses and buildings because I have long hair."

...

They began assaulting him in the hallways between classes, tripping him and then kicking and punching him -- in his knees, his groin and his back -- while he was on the floor, he said.

The Rick Sanchez rehab tour begins

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:25:00 +0000

A week after CNN fired Rick Sanchez in the wake of his comments about the number of Jews in top media positions (and his claim that Jon Stewart is "a bigot"), the anchorman sat for his first televised interview today, with "Good Morning, America's" George Stephanopoulos.

Sanchez was contrite at times, but stopped short of a full retraction.

“What I was feeling got in the way of what I should have done,” said Sanchez. "If you look at the landscape in our media in primetime," he explained, "there’s not a single Hispanic, there’s not a single African-American."

Full video is here:

O’Donnell in ’06: China plotting “take over” of U.S.

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:10:00 +0000

Christine O’Donnell has already been embroiled in controversies over witchcraft, resume embellishment, and even masturbation, and now there's news that just four years ago she warned of a supposed Chinese government plot to "take over" the United States.

The statement came during Republican Senate primary debate in Delaware in 2006, when O'Donnell was waging a longshot bid for the right to challenge Democratic Sen. Tom Carper. During the debate, she announced that she was "privy" to information on a "carefully thought out and strategic plan [by China] to take over America," citing missionary groups as the source of her "classified information."

O’Donnell went on to imply that China had "something up their sleeve," and that all attempts by the Chinese government to befriend the United States were to not be trusted.

She added: "A country that forces women to have abortions and mandates that you can only have one child and will not allow you the freedom to read the Bible, you think they can be our friend?"

In that three-way '06 GOP primary, O'Donnell finished a distant third with just 17 percent (or 2,505 votes). The primary winner, Jan Ting, went on to lose to Carper by 42 points.

The Larry Summers hall of shame

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Note: This piece has been updated since its original publication.

This week's announcement that Larry Summers will be stepping down as director of President Obama’s National Economic Council may have been most notable for the passionate reaction it prompted from his critics. "Good riddance," wrote the Progressive's Matthew Rothschild, adding that "Summers has a resume of disaster."

The outpouring shouldn't have been surprising. If nothing else, Summers, in his stints at Harvard, the World Bank and in two presidential administrations, has emerged as an accomplished lightning rod for controversy. As he prepares to decamp Washington for Harvard Yard -- he's going to be a professor -- we remember the 10 most shameful moments that Larry has brought us.

10. Asking Chris Dodd to remove post-recession caps on executive pay: Summers ran into a bit of trouble after it leaked last year that he had received free rides on Citigroup’s corporate jet ~~while~~ months before working for the Obama White House. More appalling, however, was his subsequent ~~decision~~ effort to exempt Citigroup, a ~~stimulus~~ TARP recipient, from caps on executive pay.

Meet the guy who’s running against Christine O’Donnell

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 20:45:00 +0000

By giving their nomination to the seemingly unelectable Christine O'Donnell on Tuesday, Delaware Republicans essentially handed a Senate seat to Chris Coons, an unknown county executive who won the Democratic nod.

In the GOP primary, O'Donnell upset long-serving Rep. Mike Castle, who had been widely expected to win the seat with ease in November. But O'Donnell, who ran 26 points worse than Castle in trial heats with Coons, is a different story -- something that even Karl Rove admitted this week.

So, Coons is (probably) on his way to Senate. But what do we actually know about him? Here's a quick dossier:

Name: Chris Coons

Age: 47

Party: Democrat

Alma Mater: Amherst (B.A.); Yale Law School (J.D.)

Extracurriculars:

Two-time national debate champion
Wrote book on American boycott of apartheid-era South Africa

The Triple Crown of relevant work experience:

The rawest of raw anti-Park51 propaganda

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:01:00 +0000

Over the weekend, exactly nine years after the 9/11 attacks, thousands lined the streets surrounding ground zero with a common cause -- fight the mosque! -- and a common enemy, radical Islam. (Although the "radical" part appears to be optional these days.) While cable networks provided a mostly sanitized take of the day's events, the reality was much different, with crude anti-Islamic sentiments ruling the day.

The following slide show is a sampling of the literature circulated at the rally.